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Browse the entire American Experience series featuring over 200 films. Watch full films online, download teacher’s guides, go behind the scenes, and learn more about your favorite films.
One of the most popular New Deal programs, the CCC put three million young men to work in camps across America during the height of the Great Depression.
From a small-town Texas murder emerged a landmark civil rights case. The little-known story of the Mexican American lawyers who took Hernandez v. Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow-style discrimination.
The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.
Discovery of a precious metal inspired worldwide migration by Forty-Niners, the eager gold-seekers who settled the westernmost state and turned California into a land of opportunity and fierce competition.
San Francisco built one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World" during the Great Depression while battling wind, fog, ocean currents, and earthquake-prone land.
During the Great Depression, Americans built the Hoover Dam, overcoming technical challenges to erect one of the greatest engineering works in history.
A saga of ambition, wealth, family loyalty and personal tragedy. From Joseph Kennedy's rise on Wall Street, through John, Robert and Edward's successes and scandals, the family has left a storied political legacy.
The legendary trapper, scout and soldier helped map the Oregon Trail. The ultimate frontiersman, Carson inspired popular novels before being associated with the "Long Walk" of the Navajo people.
Originally settled as a mail stop, Las Vegas has undergone several makeovers, from an Old West vacation town, to a mafia haven, to the "Atomic City" and "Sin City."
In the 1940s Dr. Walter Freeman gained fame for perfecting the lobotomy, then hailed as a miracle cure for the severely mentally ill. But within a few years, lobotomy was labeled one of the most barbaric mistakes of modern medicine.
A complex portrait of Mormonism. From Joseph Smith's discovery of gold tablets to persecution, migration, and settlement in Utah, the film explores the history of the most American of religions.
From Reconstruction to the 1960s, this film offers a portrait of New Orleans that reflects the best and the worst in America: Mardi Gras, jazz music, and struggles with segregation.
The story of the polio crusade pays tribute to a time when Americans banded together to conquer a terrible disease. The medical breakthrough saved countless lives and had a pervasive impact on American philanthropy that continues to be felt today.
Born in Puerto Rico, Clemente was an exceptional baseball player and humanitarian whose career sheds light on larger issues of immigration, civil rights and cultural change. He would die in a tragic plane crash.
One of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history, Seabiscuit was the long shot that captured America's heart during the Depression.
In 1967 thousands of hippies flocked to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district only to discover that the counterculture celebration had descended into drug abuse and occasional violence.
The story of the farmers who came to the Southern Plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas dreaming of prosperity, and lived through ten years of drought, dust, disease and death.
The pioneering researchers in the effort to conceive babies through in vitro fertilization faced daunting obstacles and much controversy before the world's first test tube baby was born on July 25, 1978.
A brilliant scientist, Oppenheimer was tasked with the development of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II.
Today one of the most-recognized figures in American literary history, poet Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass and chronicler of the damage done by Civil War, was denounced by critics in his own time.
The story of Native peoples’ valiant resistance to expulsion from their lands and the extinction of their culture -- from the Wampanoags of New England, who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes (episode 1, “After the Mayflower”), to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity (episode 5, “Wounded Knee”). Also, contemporary Native Americans tell their own stories and NativeNow explores important issues of language, sovereignty and enterprise.
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